Buyer's remorse

[Joe]

So a few days ago I got my teclast X80 in the mail.

After playing with it for a few days I’ve been experiencing a slight amount of buyer’s remorse.

At first the device felt great, gorgeous screen , nice form factor, light and comfortable on my hands. Then the first caveats reared their ugly heads.

First thing I noticed was that the tablet got hot, uncomfortably so even. It did this, not when being forced to perform at full capacity, but with simple web browsing. Touching the hottest spots on its back felt definitely uncomfortable, which forced me to keep my hands away from those areas.

Then there was the battery life which basically drained away before my eyes. Not unexpected, but still annoying.

And finally the deal breaker was the incredibly poor wifi. To fully describe my frustration with the wifi horrendous performance would require words not allowed in polite conversation. The damn thing disconnects constantly, and doesn’t reconnect half the time. And that’s without getting into discussing its incredibly short range.

And yet, at the price I managed to snatch it, these issues are, not entirely unexpected. I still like the device. But that doesn’t make those issues any less annoying. It’s still a pretty nifty tablet despite its many, problems.

Part of the remorse arises from the sale price for the cube iwork8 which some people claim has a far more stable connection, but I wouldn’t know, personally. Out of curiosity , can anyone confirm or deny this?

[Rob]

For people that are shopping for a small inexpensive tablet, I have the x80pro, also just a recent purchase.  After having it a month or so and just kind of fumbling around with it, I think I would generally agree with Joe.  If you haven’t pulled the trigger on your order yet, strongly consider moving on.

I don’t think it’s a total flop, but I can confirm the issue that Joe has with poor wifi.  It’s not a “lottery” issue, but I think it is a design flaw.  Along those lines, I’m finding my tablet only really useful when it’s plugged in and if I take it somewhere, it really needs to be fully charged to become portable.

I don’t know.  I think I got a good value on $80USD worth of tablet,  but I think there are some problems with this class of tablet that I didn’t consider.  So you can add a USB battery pack type portable charger and a car charger to give you more time plugged in.  For this model, the x80 Pro, it doesn’t come with a USB charger, just the cable.  So if you are like me, you won’t have a good match for charging it.  I have a couple cell phone chargers, but they provide less than an amp of charging, so it makes the problem even more exaggerated.  I think this can be fixed, but it is one more diversion you will need to go on.  I haven’t properly tested it myself yet, but I think it supports a 2A charger.  So I can probably buy one pretty inexpensively, or maybe even just go to a cell phone store and ask if they have a box full of them and get one for free.  But if I’m going to do that, I’m going to want a OTG + Charging Y cable as well.  For me, it just quickly throws the balance off on this tablet for the work to set it up vs what was saved.  After a month, I’m still trying to sort out what I can fit on the tablet’s limited storage to maximize it’s usefulness.

I’ll make the best of it, and on the plus side, because I am a light user it still may work out for me, but I’m really questioning the value of it.  I think dual boot is a good idea, but after having to go back to Android 5.1 and also running out of space on both sides, it’s pretty clear that you need more than 32GB for it to work.

If I had to buy over again, I look more at 64GB, confirmed 4+ hours run time unplugged, what cables are included (I bought a micro HDMI cable for the tablet and if someone offered that and OTG + Charging Y cable, it would be much better than the OTG -or- Charging that you have to choose between with the two cables that are included.), and something in the 10″ screen size category.  I think even if I can address all the issues of this tablet (x80 Pro) for less than the cost of a good 64GB 10″ dual boot, it’s hard to see how I will have a better tablet or have saved money.  I’m not so disappointed that I’m going to sell it and start over, but I think I will come out as a fail for this tablet meeting my purpose of use.

Joe, on my tablet, it gets warm, but not so hot it’s uncomfortable to touch when using it.  That might be a tablet “lottery” issue for build quality.  If I’m not enthusiastic about sourcing all the odds and ends I think are needed for this tablet, I’m even less enthusiastic about opening it up and redoing the heat sink.  With the results Chris gets when he uses a copper shim and better heat sink compound, that might be something to consider for the x80Pro but unless you want to mod it and it’s fun, I would consider your time, the cost of materials, and the risk of breaking or damaging the tablet.  If it was getting hot to the point it was uncomfortable to the touch, I’d consider doing that, or lapping the heat sink, which I’ve done before on desktop PCs and have all the grades of wet/dry sandpaper for already.  Having a trued up, flat heatsink with a mirror finish and artic silver (vs stock compound) has given a measurable improvement for desktop heatsinks, so it seems like it would work for the tablet as well.  My disclaimer is that I haven’t opened it up so I can’t confirm this would apply, but I wanted to throw the idea out there for you to consider.  I found a video of someone taking the back off, and in the last 10seconds or so, it shows you the internals of the tablet.  If you watch the first 6 minutes without fast forwarding, you have more patience than me, but basically it shows someone working around the tablet popping loose the plastic tabs.  Rather than break one of the tabs off, I’m sticking with not messing with it for now.

Taking the back off an x80Pro:

Some overview on lapping a heatsink:

http://www.overclockersclub.com/guides/lapping/

Here’s a video of someone’s “fix” to the wifi… using an external usb wifi adapter.  Really, really not my solution.  If you have that hanging off the port, for me, eventually you will hit it on something and loosen and damage the port.

Hang in there, and I hope that as you get your tablet set up, it will get more sorted out to your liking.

PS.  Sorry for the excess spacing in the post, I just left one line, but it made big gaps.  I’m not sure how to clean it up without bunching everything together.

[dabney]

should I get it for $79 on geekbuyng?

[James Deen]

dabney wrote:

should I get it for $79 on geekbuyng?

It depends for what is it for? If you are just using it for browsing or editing your documents, then it would be your good luck since the price is great.  Just be careful with the unit since they are having some problems on their devices.  I personally will not touch it since i do not want to spend money on something that could not last for years.

[flopflop]

I use it as a smart picture frame. Works great for that. And it’s nice to have a backup android/windows machine to use for troubleshooting other PC’s. I want to start using it as a control interface for an open source smart home, should be great for that too. Especially if you run linux on it.

[frab]

dabney wrote:

should I get it for $79 on geekbuyng?

If you plan on actually using wifi…hell no.

 

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